In the future, everything will look a lot like Star Trek not because of the prescience of the show’s creators, but because of the desire of engineers to make things look like Star Trek.

The adjacent Bizarro cartoon reminded me of this maxim and I quickly thought, “What a great app, to have a tricorder on your iPhone!” A quick search of the app store found that there are at least four makers ahead of me.

Of course, they’re only novelty apps for now and (since I’m not such a diligent trekkie) what I was thinking of was not the tricorder but that wand “Bones” McCoy used. But the apps all look like great fun and if you do a YouTube search for tricorders you’ll find iPhone apps and other simulations of tricorders and you’ll find this concept video of a pen that holds terabytes of data and can project on walls. Apparently we will have wonderful tools in the future, but, as you’ll see halfway through the video, we’ll still have to downgrade the software to Windows XP.